Haines is taking the position that Trump's calling Kim Jong Un "Rocket Man" was "a smart move," because "If you think of Putin and you think of Kim Jong Un and you think of Donald Trump they love these phallic references to masculine dominance." That is, these men don't just enjoy talking about their phallus, they experience power as a phallic, making them vulnerable to taunts that call their masculinity into play.

It's really a very obvious observation of a sort that I've heard all my life. In "The Number of the Beast" (1980), Robert A. Heinlein wrote:

"No, she's absolutely right," said Zeb, patting the enormous pistol at his hip. "This is a penis substitute. After all, if I could kill at a range of thirty meters with my penis, I wouldn't need to carry this thing around, now would I?"

After all, most of them are vaguely phallic (any object longer than it is wide = phallic), they penetrate human flesh, and killing people is a sign of virility. In the case of guns, they even "ejaculate" bullets, while swords tend to have a suggestive shape, guard positions where the hilt is held crotch height, and thrusting attacks. Even better if they are combined (bayonets on guns are the simplest applications of this, as well as any syringe-like weapon).

Glenn's taunt, aimed at the "View" women is "EVER SINCE TRUMP APPEARED, LATENT PHALLOPHOBIA HAS BECOME BLATANT PHALLOPHOBIA." If a nuclear weapon is the phallic symbol, the fear is justified and not a phobia. I don't think anyone has an exaggerated, unrealistic fear of a nuclear weapon because of its resemblance to a phallus. And it is realistic to think about how sexuality affects political and military decisionmaking. The women on "The View" handle the subject in a very fast-moving, light-hearted way, but it's a serious topic, and I think that Donald Trump has chosen to boldly display masculinity and to flaunt his superior masculine weaponry to intimidate Kim Jong Un. In this context, "Rocket Man" does translate — psychologically — into mocking Kim Jong Un for having a small penis. To point that out is not phobia, but straightforward analysis of Trump rhetoric and psychology in foreign relations.

Remember how we laughed at Kim Jong Un when his rockets failed:

Of course, it's phallic. It's phallophobia not to see the phallus aimed straight at your face.

Or does Glenn Reynolds expect us to believe that Trump wanted us to simply fill in the line with "burning out his fuse up there alone." Now, it's certainly true that — at least here in America — we associate Kim Jong Un with loneliness...

... and, sure, let's give Trump credit for needling Kim about his pathetic loneliness as well as his small penis — it's a taunt, and taunts can be multidimensional — but the line "burning out his fuse up there alone" has always been hard to hear. I listened to the song a hundred times without understanding the line, which eventually I read or... I don't know... heard William Shatner enunciate the hell out of...

Key phrase: I'm not the man they think I am at home....

That's self-doubt about masculinity. If we can imagine Kim Jong Un thinking through Bernie Taupin's lyrics, the "they" is the North Korean people, brainwashed to believe in Kim's greatness. But if he's Rocket Man, that's not enough. He knows he's not that man at all.

I always figured it was "burning out his fuel" but that would make too much sense.

Tiny fingered Trump is definitely jealous of Kim's huge rockets. Not to mention how many Koreans are named "Hung" That is what is wrong with Trump, he has no class, when a guy whips his dick around, like Kim does, it's best not to mention it and pretend you didn't see it. Lack of class tells.

One thing I haven't seen yet, from any article or pundit, is how Rocketman would be translated into Korean and how such a nickname would be perceived in Korean culture, in both general terms and its North Korean variant.

Maybe Rocketman is a compliment. Hell, he WANTS to be Rocketman, doesn't he? He's building rockets.

You (Ann) made me think of a picture from the 80s of Trump with girlfriend Rowanne Brewer. Trump is wearing an extra long neck tie and Rowanne is displaying ample cleavage. Camille Paglia pointed to it somewhere, commenting on the hyper hetero sexuality. Those were the days!

How. would Hillary have handles a threatened launch of a missile at Guam? I mean without making any references to anything remotely phallic? I guess it would be the same way a woman might deal with it when in a social situation, she encounters a man with an inappropriate hard-on. "Uh, Mr Kim,,, Ummm..... Your.... Mr Kim, would you like to excuse yourself for a minute?" Or she could go the female privilege route and say to Kim "Who are you going to terrify with that?!?! I've seen missiles before and that's no missile!"

There is a reason (phalli?) are shaped the way they are. I suppose if humans laid eggs, we could have cloacas, but evolution rejected that option. Dicks are thus shaped to penetrate and inject. Swords only need to penetrate, guns inject lead at a distance. Missiles need to slip through the atmosphere in the same way that a dick has to slip through the vagina to reach the target. This theorizing is x amount of nonsense.

Women seem to prefer to use poison to murder men. That's probably why the patriarchy decided that chemical weapons should be banned.

There is a song about "Texas Red" and the guy with "the big gun on his hip" who was exceptionally fast with a gun. Now there you have a phallus substitute because if your gun is too heavy, it's going to slow you down. A big heavy gun is stupid, it should only be as big and heavy as needed to effectively kill at the desired range. If you were to say that most of the guns in movies were basically phallic symbols, I couldn't argue with you.

The real problem is applying techniques of analysis that apply to deconstruction literature to the real world. In a novel. if it is well written, just about every detail has a meaning. But in real life, we call people who believe that paranoid schizophrenics.

The Number of the Beast makes me think that I bought that book at a airport book/magazine stand. Which makes me think that back then science fiction was a popular enough genre that convenience stores stocked racks with SF books. Books that had covers that did not resemble the ones on romance novels. Some of them did have rockets though. To get this back on topic.

Oh, I bought the novelization of Star Wars before the movie came out, and never saw it in theaters. Irma Bombeck wrote a column, "Ten Things To Say To Stop Conversation At A Party." One of them was, "I haven't seen Star Wars, but I have read the book."

Would you argue that in use "homophobia" means irrational fear of homosexuals? Because it doesn't. Neither does "phallophobia" mean irrational fear of either phalluses or bombs. Both alleged phobias refer to an attitude of hostility.

"It might be common but it's not "obvious" because it's just some Freudian bullshit that feministas and their ilk use to insult men and masculinity."

The fact that the idea is most associated with Freud proves it's not just some feminist bullshit. Most feminists, back in the day when Freud was revered, hated Freud. He wasn't seen as furthering the feminist cause.

I have to reread Number of the Beast... I've read it a zillion times but I do not remember that quote - at all. I know this is OT, but can anybody suggest where it occurs in the book? (If it does. I haven't entirely abandoned the thought that Prof. Althouse is messing with me. Us. Whatever.)

If you can find a shape with a lower drag coefficient than a "long streamlined body" that is capable of both carrying an engine and a warhead, something not shaped like a penis that is fit for purpose, let us know. I suppose that is because science is patriarchal.

If we were in the vacuum of space, and still a penis like shape was insisted upon, when any shape would do, you would have a point.

The fact that The View took Kim's side, a guy who just used VX nerve gas to assassinate a rival on foreign soil, just to take one example, is pretty telling of where they are.

I would love to see a non-patriarchal gun design. One that didn't waste too much material, but was able to direct a projectile, with due speed and accuracy, at a target, that didn't somehow resemble a penis. In programming there is a concept called "design patterns" Works in natural selection too, and engineering.

"After all, most of them are vaguely phallic (any object longer than it is wide = phallic), they penetrate human flesh, and killing people is a sign of virility."

Well, I dunno. When Zog wanted to kill a wild animal or the caveman next door, did he think "Aha! I will choose this stick as my weapon because it reminds me of my penis, which is also a weapon!" Or did he pick it because a pointed stick , or a piece of flint with the edge honed sharp, gives you a better chance at killing someone or something that standing there throwing rocks? Weapons penetrate because penetrating the flesh and slicing an artery or the jugular is the quickest way to kill someone.

Primitive peoples also dug deep holes in the ground and covered the hole with leafy branches, hoping that their enemies or tomorrow's dinner would walk over the hole and fall in. Is that -or any sort of trap - ever described as a vaginal symbol?

Rockets are phallic looking because long pointed objects have better trajectory than a rocket shaped like a boob would have.

Way over my head, but I keep reading comments in German on German newspaper articles that refer to Kim as "Raketenmann". It stuck. It worked. What Trump wanted to do was focus everyone's attention on the firing of the rockets over/around other countries, and his "injudicious" language appears to have done that.

"I have to reread Number of the Beast... I've read it a zillion times but I do not remember that quote - at all. I know this is OT, but can anybody suggest where it occurs in the book? (If it does. I haven't entirely abandoned the thought that Prof. Althouse is messing with me. Us. Whatever.)"

I'm trusting the TV Tropes website.

I tried using Google books to search the book and didn't find the quote. I wonder if there are different versions of the book with different edits.

It seems like something you'd remember if you'd read it many times. I had some thought that maybe it was a different Heinlein book, but the character in NOTB is named Zeb...

Anybody who thinks the women of The View of liberals (they fire women who don't tow the line) is to be taken seriously should go to their shrinks fast. They sure don't represent my view, or any of my friends views. They are vile, mean and DUMB

I'd like to bring the subject back to boobs. This is a subject that not only has greater inherent interest but is more conducive to understanding the deep contradictions of sexual politics....,,.. Boobs are women's phallic symbols. In cartoons, if not in real life, women with power and a mission to save the world are always shown as having sharp, pointy tits. Here's the problem with that. Whilst sharp, pointy tits are nothing to be sneezed at, they are a secondary sex characteristic and not the ultimate source of a woman's sexual power......The penis, by contrast, shows an admirable unity of purpose and function. All of man's procreational and recreational faculties are located in one handy organ. These faculties are more diffuse and widespread in a woman's body........Her greatest power lies in her uterus which has the power to create life, and that's potent indeed. It's hard, however, to draw a potent uterus symbol for an action hero. Jennifer Lawrence would look pretty clumsy wiping out super villains if she were seven months pregnant....,,Beyond this, lies the sad fact that the locus of a woman's greatest sexual pleasure is nowhere near her uterus, and there is no universally recognized symbol for it. The clitoris simply doesn't have the clear, simple lines of a penis, and who even knows what g-spot looks like........The sharp, pointed breast is the best way to symbolize a woman's power, but, on reflection, there's something contradictory about that. The point of a tit is to nurture life, not to project power over life........I think women will continue to be mired in penis envy until such time as we can invent a really cool phallic symbol that they can embrace. Hillary's pantsuit is a welcome step in that direction but more work needs to be done.

One reason women should not be in combat arms units of the military. They are not trained from age one to shoot straight, so they don't put firepower on the target. Another terrible terrible male supremacy to be atoned for.

“Rocket man…...burning out his fuse up there alone…”This is brilliant. Gives an entirely new and complete meaning to the Trump tweet re crazy Kim.And, btw, who ever knew William Shatner could be so cool?!

Agreed. They really are nasty women in exactly the way Trump meant it, not in the self-congratulatory sense liberal women apply the term to themselves. They see themselves as feisty; everyone with any sense they are loudmouthed, ignorant shrews who would have been sentenced to the dunking stool in colonial New England.

When we're kids we throw rocks at each other. In comedies we throw pies. Angry women throw fragile objects that explode into tiny pieces near their cheating husband's head-- well, in the movies they do. Even on the internet we get a kick out of hurling invectives. There's nothing overtly macho about throwing things. It's what we do. It's why our dogs think we're gods-- we can throw things!

In battles we hurl projectiles. Over time our projectiles have gotten bigger and deadlier. That some of them happen to be phallic-shaped is just a coincidence of physics.

Sometimes a rocket is just a rocket.Sorta seems like you're pretending this is an example of thinking deeply about as subject but somehow your conclusion is one that a shallow freshman psychology student would give--everything is phalluses!

The Korean Police Action proved one thing: that the Norks (now in a Truce with the UN) are as stubborn an any enemy as we have ever faced. And they will honor no rules of engagement...none...never. Any war against them has to be one that goes on until it ends in their total destruction.

Which is why Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the EU/German State have to be OK with the USA conducting that type of War. Which is exactly what DJT has been working on, and what the Dems and Globalist GOP Senators are complaining loudest about.

tim in vermont said...If you can find a shape with a lower drag coefficient than a "long streamlined body" that is capable of both carrying an engine and a warhead, something not shaped like a penis that is fit for purpose, let us know. I suppose that is because science is patriarchal.

Tim those are FACTS. We're not talking about FACTS. We're talking about FEELINGS. It FEELS like the shape of a rocket reinforces male domination, ok? Whether you and your FACT-lovers can come up with some "scientific" explanation for the shape or not is immaterial--that does not address how the shape makes people FEEL.

The "I fucking love science" crowd happens to be the same group equating the prevalence of "penis shaped" launch vehicles with patriarchal oppression, yes. IF that strikes you as absurd in some way it's only because you don't understand the FEELINGS involved here, ok? You need to check your fact privilege, Tim.

Maybe empirical reality is patriarchal! I bet you never thought about that, did you Tim? How do you think that makes us FEEEEEL?

Pointing out that rockets look like willies tells us nothing about nuclear strategy. Some turnips look like willies. The Area Rule means many supersonic aircraft look like a woman's waist; but it tells us nothing about air superiority.

The laws of nature have conspired against feminists to make everything that goes fast in a fluid environment look like a cock. Even stuff that moves in a vacuum can look masculine. Compare this to this. Cool, huh? Planets could perhaps be female symbols. There's a vague semblance evident when this is juxtaposed to this. Earth is a planet sometimes known by feminine names. Gaia is one. Terra (first declension noun) is another. Gaia spent a billion years baking her cookies, when a nasty masculine comet came and ate 'em all up, sorta like this.

Mother Nature is such a bitch. You'd think she'd be more into sisterhood. But no, most planets are big fat useless wastes of space like this, NO! NO! like this! (Whew, that was close...)

Everything discussed on "The View" comes back to the penis, eventually.

Notice that the View bitches never ever spoke of Obama and penises in the same conversation. He may or may not have been our first crypto-socialist president, but Obama certainly was the biggest nancy boy to live in the White House since Buchanan.

My earlier thesis was cylindrical stuff is masculine while round things are feminine. I stand on firm ground, I think. Freud agrees with me (speak up, Ziggy, the whole world is watching...). Now given that contemplate this

re: the Heinlein quote, I don't think that quote is real. I've read Number of the Beast at least half a dozen times and I don't remember that at all. Plus, it doesn't read like Heinlein. He was very pro-gun and that quote is very dismissive.

Not necessarily. Maybe he has an unusual hobby that the folks back home don't know about, maybe he doesn't flush every time, or maybe he hates dogs but keeps it hidden. Maybe only Mr. Taupin knows, or maybe even he doesn't. Maybe "Rocket Man Part II" will explore the true meaning.